NASA’s Juno Spacecraft to Arrive at Jupiter Today

THE CULMINATION OF A FIVE-YEAR JOURNEY


A model of the Juno spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA.  Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)
Today, after an almost five-year journey, NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter. This evening, Juno will perform an orbit insertion maneuver, a 35-minute burn of its main engine, to slow the spacecraft by about 542 meters per second (1,212 miles per hour) so it can be captured into the gas giant’s orbit.

So, what if something goes wrong? The Juno mission team is definitely prepared. They’ve programmed the spacecraft with ways to restart itself if something stops the engine burn. That’s good, because NASA really won’t be in a position to help the spacecraft if any problems arise. It takes about 48 minutes to send a radio signal to Jupiter, and 48 minutes to send one back. If there is an issue, NASA will hear about it an hour later, and by that time it will be way too late for the space agency to send any corrective signals from Earth.

Interested in live coverage of the event?

NASA TV coverage of orbital insertion begins tonight at 10:30 p.m. EDT. Or check out NASA’s “Eyes on the Solar System” app that lets you fly along with Juno during Jupiter orbit insertion.

“WE ARE READY”

Once in Jupiter’s orbit, the spacecraft will circle the Jovian world 37 times during 20 months, skimming to within 5,000 km (3,100 miles) above the cloud tops. This is the first time a spacecraft will orbit the poles of Jupiter, providing new answers to ongoing mysteries about the planet’s core, composition and magnetic fields.

“We are ready,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “The science team is incredibly excited to be arriving at Jupiter.  The engineers and mission controllers are performing at an Olympic level getting Juno successfully into orbit. As Juno barrels down on Jupiter, the scientists are busy looking at the amazing approach science the spacecraft has already returned to Earth.  Jupiter is spectacular from afar and will be absolutely breathtaking from close up.”

Not quite ready for your closeup, Jupiter? Don’t worry. Juno won’t begin taking hi-def photos and videos until its first flyby on August 27. After waiting five years, another month shouldn’t be too bad for the Juno team.

MIT Confirms the Ozone Hole is Healing

MIT Confirms the Ozone Hole is Healing

PROTECTING THE PROTECTOR

The Montreal Protocol of 1987 called upon the world to control the production and use of ozone-depleting substances (ODS) in order to protect the ozone layer—which is our very own protection from high levels of ultraviolet rays from the sun.

Nearly 30 years after the whole world joined forces to address the threat brought about by the thinning ozone layer, scientists at MIT confirm that the hole over Antarctica is starting to heal.

“We can now be confident that the things we’ve done have put the planet on a path to heal,” said MIT lead researcher Susan Solomon, who also happens to be the first to distinguish the conditions of temperature and sunlight under which chlorine could eat away at the ozone layer, back in 1986.



They found evidence that the September ozone hole has shrunken by over 4 million square kilometers since. The world’s efforts to reverse the damage are showing promising results, and that is despite some setbacks caused by sulfur dioxide from volcanic eruptions.

In 2015, the hole reached a record size, which had scientists puzzled. This paper analyzed and made sense of the factors that contributed to that incident.

“Why I like this paper so much is, nature threw us a curveball in 2015,” says Ross Salawitch, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Maryland. “People thought we set a record for the depth of the ozone hole in October 2015. The Solomon paper explains it was due to a specific volcanic eruption. So without this paper, if all we had was the data, we would be scratching our heads — what was going on in 2015?”

The team measured “fingerprints” and found a substantial decline in atmospheric chlorine from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are ozone-depleting substances emitted through old dry cleaning methods, refrigerators, and aerosols.


Aerosol sprays contain CFCs.
“It showed we can actually see a chemical fingerprint, which is sensitive to the levels of chlorine, finally emerging as a sign of recovery,” said one of the researchers, Diane Ivy.

NOT A TIME FOR COMPLACENCY

“This is a reminder that when the world gets together, we really can solve environmental problems,” Solomon said. “I think we should all congratulate ourselves on a job well done.”

The hole is estimated to be completely and permanently closed by 2050, provided the world keeps progress steady.i

A 60Tbps “FASTER” Undersea Optic Cable Connecting Japan and the US is Now Live

FASTER, the aptly named 9,000-kilometer fibre optic cable connecting Japan and the US goes live today. It is considered the highest capacity undersea fibre optic cable ever built and will be delivering 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific.
9,000 KILOMETERS, 60TBPS (Terabytes per second)

The undersea optic cable connecting Japan and the US running 9,000 kilometers from Oregon all the way to the east coast of Japan is now live!

The project, which was first announced in 2014, is the highest capacity underwater fibre optic cable ever built. It has appropriately been named “FASTER,” and rightly so—the cable will be delivering data across the Pacific at speeds of up to 60 Terabits per second (Tbps). “From the very beginning of the project, we repeatedly said to each other, ‘faster, Faster and FASTER’, and at one point it became the project name, and today it becomes a reality,” said Hiromitsu Todokoro, chairman of the FASTER management committee.

Google is being allocated 10Tbps of this bandwidth. “This is especially exciting, as we prepare to launch a new Google Cloud Platform East Asia region in Tokyo later this year,” Google’s Alan Chin-Lun Cheung wrote. “Dedicated bandwidth to this region results in faster data transfers and reduced latency as GCP customers deliver their applications and information to customers around the globe.”

Watch how FASTER was laid out across the Pacific in this video:


PREPARING FOR THE DATA-HEAVY FUTURE

FASTER hopes to address the increasing broadband traffic between the two continents, which is estimated to get heavier in the future, and also aims to cater to other service providers in Asia. It took six companies to make this feat possible: Google, Global Transit, China Telecom Global, Singtel, China Mobile International, and KDDI. Building the cable itself required the services of another party, Japanese IT company NEC Corporation. “The cable system … will help spur innovation on both sides of the Pacific to simulate the growth of the digital economy,” said Singtel vice president Ooi Seng Keat.

Long-range undersea cables seem to be turning into the new common and are stretching farther and farther with ever-competing bandwidths, with the recent construction of Facebook and Microsoft’s 4,000-mile cable across the Atlantic, and another two by…yep, Google again.

And at the dawn of the quantum computer age, it seems only fitting that internet service providers get a head start.

Single-Molecule Switch Brings Super-Fast, Light-Based Computers Closer to Reality

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT



In case you aren’t aware, light is faster than electricity, which means that computing with light would be preferable, as it will be far faster. Moreover, by deceasing the size of components, we are also able to increase computing speed.

So what if you combine the two?

Chinese researchers are making headway in doing just that, and to that end, they may have just vastly accelerated the development of light-based computers.

Researchers from the Peking University of Beijing created a switch that can be turned on or off by just a single photon. Ultimately, this paves the way for remarkably small systems (think: microscopic) that work using light. Indeed, the team asserts that this could be useful in systems like solar panels, light sensors, and could even be applicable in biomedical technology.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

To break down the work, molecular electronics involve the development of electronic circuits from just a single molecule. Previous studies utilized diarylethene and gold electrodes. Another study used graphene and carbon nanotubes electrodes. Both methods did not work.

Additionally, previous attempts with similar projects encountered problems such as the switch getting stuck in the “on” position and some types of light not being capable of activating the component. The researchers used different materials that allow the component to stabilize in any of the binary positions and that could actually be activated by light.

But perhaps most notably, earlier versions of the switch only had short self-lives, while this one can last up to a year. According to Ioan Bâldea of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, as told to Scientific American,  “In many cases, molecular junctions have lives of minutes, hours, or in fortunate cases days.” To that end, a system that can last a year is a vast, vast improvement.

While this component will not be available for commercial use just yet, this development is a major step forward in building microscopic-scale components for our computers and electronics.

Sony Announces the creation of a robot that can form Emotional bond with people

Sony has announced plans to develop a robot “capable of forming an emotional bond with customers.”

Sony’s chief executive Kazuo Hirai did not disclose specific details about the robots, but says it will propose new business models that integrate hardware and services to provide emotionally compelling experiences.

Sony is re-entering the consumer robotics game after increased competition in the Asian markets led to massive cost cutting in 2006. It has, however, launched Aibo, its canine-modelled artificial intelligence robot. Alongside its popularity as a consumer robot, the robots were used by researchers for a number of areas, including a robotic football tournament in 2005.



FOLLOWING AIBO’S PAWSTEPS

A decade later, it seems that a lot of tech companies are finding ways to make the human-robot interaction as warm and fuzzy as possible. Japanese telecoms company SoftBank made similar “emotional” claims about its Pepper companion robot, while Boston Dynamics has unveiled earlier the SpotMini, a robot with a sense of humor.

It’s not surprisingly that Sony would want to get back in the game after it had made great strides a decade ago with AIBO dogs, which some users have gone as far as to hold funerals for.

Hirai also announced that virtual reality will be another future area of growth for Sony. The PlayStation VR system is set to launch in October, and Sony believes it’s well-placed to take advantage of the technology in areas like entertainment and digital imaging as well as gaming. The company also says it’s considering “cultivating [VR] as a new business domain.”

All in all, Sony has a lot in store for the newest generation of techies.

Battle of the Machines: Robocup 2016 Starts Tomorrow!

The Robocup 2016 will feature 3,500 participants from 400 countries and will feature robot soccer competitions, robot-based elderly care, and autonomous vehicles demonstrations, among others. The event runs June 30 until July 4.
ROBOTICS WORLD CUP

This year marks the 20th Robocup, featuring 3,500 participants: 500 teams from 40 countries. The cup takes place from June 30 until July 4th in Leipzig, Germany.

The event is a big one.  The competition allots 70 playing fields, ranging from six and 170 square meters in size, to ensure adherence to international standards and regulations of precision. In fact, the soccer competitions alone have been allocated 2,200 square meters of playing fields.

Robocup is a truly international event. The Leipziger Messe (Leipzig Trade Fair) has issued more than 800 visa invitation letters specifically for the cup.


THE FIFA CHALLENGE AND MORE

According to the website, “ever since 1997, the RoboCup Federation has been pursuing its objective of developing intelligent humanoid soccer-playing robots which by 2050 will be able to beat the current FIFA champions.” This does sound ambitious, but Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences professor, Gerhard Kraetzschmar, echoes the same message in his welcome note for the Robocup this year: “By 2050, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, played according to official rules of FIFA, against the winner of the most recent FIFA World Cup.”

The competition has been broadening their categories far beyond the field of soccer through the years. The website boasts, “Additional application disciplines addressing diverse societal needs such as intelligent robots as assistants for rescue missions, in households and in industrial production have been added during the last few years.” These additions include robot-based elderly care, autonomous vehicles, and disaster response.

For those who are interested in attending the event, you can buy your tickets here. Additionally, for the aspiring next generation of scientists and engineers, there is also RobocupJunior to help kick-start inventive thinking and discovery in young people.

Meet The Artificial Intelligence that composes Music that enhances your brain functionality

Brain.fm uses an artificial intelligence to compose music that is designed to enhance your brain's performance—decreasing anxiety, improving focus, and alleivaiting insomnia through neural entrainment.
There’s an AI that’s making music. It’s known as brain.fm, and it could help decrease anxiety, relieve insomnia, and improve mental performance.

Founded by Adam Hewett and Junaid Kalmadi, brain.fm aims to alter your mind with sound. Or to be more specific, they hope to alter your mind with music…music that is composed by an AI (but more on that later). Hewett describes the work as “Auditory brain stimulation,” which is a mechanism that relies on something known as “brain entrainment” (also known as “neural entrainment”).

This is a novel—and somewhat unconventional—theory that is centered on how brain waves alter in response to acoustic stimulation (sound).

It’s stimulating brain waves reliably with audio, and being able to to reliably see that on an EEG to use it as a therapy.
The basic idea is that certain sounds evoke very specific responses in the brain. In other words, listening to music can alter, or induce, certain neural oscillations—oscillations that can achieve a host of things, such as altered mood, decreased anxiety, or improved focus. Notably, those who advocate neural entrainment assert that these acoustic-induced alterations can be seen and analyzed via electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements, which is, of course, where the science comes in.

Hewett succinctly sums the process, and what Brain.fm is attempting to do with it: “It’s stimulating brain waves reliably with audio, and being able to to reliably see that on an EEG to use it as a therapy. That’s what we’ve actually been doing for 13 years…now we’re working with universities and institutions to confirm this and innovate on it further.”

THE RESEARCH

Notably, the team works with neuroscientists in order to scientifically verify that the types of responses that they’re aiming for with their music are, in fact, the ones that they are generating.

For example, the team utilized the work of Dr. Benjamin Morillon, who researches dynamic attending theory, which, as Kalmadi explains, “is a new theory in neuroscience that helps explain how oscillations in music can affect oscillations in the brain.”

And they have completed pilot studies with Dr. Giovanni Santostasi, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, to see how the auditory stimulation can impact sleep and focus. Kalmadi notes, “We got some promising results on both of the studies, but that’s the preliminary studies, so we’re now focusing on building on top of that with the next layer of a more rigorous study.”

Kalmadi notes the significance of their current results, saying that the music patterns clearly lineup with the EEG readouts, “The spikes we see on the EEG mimic the audio stimulus. The music frequency follows the EEG…literally, follows. It’s become that accurate.”

And they’re also getting help from artificial intelligence.

MUSIC MEETS AI

Of course, it would take a long time to compose a diverse array of songs, ones that individuals could listen to for hours without experiencing monotony. Trying to create songs that effectively incorporate the various auditory components that generate a specific response in the brain and are also unique (and pleasing to listen to) is even more difficult.

So the team gave the work to artificial intelligence.

Kalmadi outlines the difficult and time consuming nature of the process, and why the team needed the AI: “Every single 30-minute session used to take a day all the way up to a week to make. In order to make the first 20 sessions, when we were just getting brain.fm off the ground, it took us 4 months to put together. So it’s [the AI is] a necessity. How do we create like a massive amount of content that is fresh in terms of its diversity, in terms of its genre of music, and actually takes a ton of rules of what we understand between neuroscience and music to quite accurately entrain the brain?”

And it seems that the answer to this question rests in AI.

Kalmadi continues, “So the AI, we like to describe it on a very high level, has the brain of a neuroscientist and the heart of a musician. It actually composes all the music from the ground up by taking a bunch of rules within neuroscience music, and it makes these sessions, but it sounds like it’s made by humans.”

Hewett explains how the AI works: “we’re using what could most easily be described as an emergent AI, or emergence…. emergent AI is basically taking a set of kind of small instructions, or small little pieces, and then it expands and emerges into something beautiful.”

To break this down a bit, in relation to artificial intelligence, emergence is a process in which larger patterns (like a fluid song) emerge through interactions among smaller or simpler parts.

Hewett continues:

We start out with what we might call a SongBot, this kind of overarching overlord—the composer of this kind of song. That bot, the SongBot, gets all kinds of instructions like “what kind of genre do I want?”, “what brain waves am I stimulating?”, “what’s the BPM?”. I can leave it open; I can have it do a minor key or a major key.

You can give it instructions, and from there, it spawns off tens of thousands of other little individual bots, you could say.

They’re really just little kind of pieces of code, little brains. And each of these will be a note or a drum beat, and they will have kind of a mind of their own, and they’ll have instructions. For example, a drum beat will want to be in the first part of the measure, or the middle of the measure.

But that doesn’t always happen, and you have to understand that these bots are competing against each other. They form patterns, and subsequent bots that are propagated learn from the previous ones, and they try to emulate those patterns. So as a pattern emerges, the pattern becomes greater for subsequent iterations.
Kalmadi concludes by noting that a lot of work is currently being done in this field, and that the system will only improve and become more effective (better at generating the desired response in the brain) as new research comes out.

Perhaps most notably is the impact that this could have on human health and medicine: “It’s an emerging field, not a lot of people are aware of the powerful effects music can have on the brain. But we’re getting the scientific community very interested in this.”

You can give it a try here.

WATCH – Sunspring, A Film Written Entirely By An AI (Artificial Intelligence

Sunspring, a short science fiction film written by an AI made its online debut--and it looks, surprisingly, pretty good.
There’s a short science fiction film that just made its debut online;it’s about three people living in a dystopian future on a space station. Thomas Middleditch of Silicon Valley fame stars in it, opposite Elisabeth Gray and Humphrey Ker, who could all possibly be in a love triangle. Stuff Hollywood B-movies are made of.

It’s called Sunspring—and it was written entirely by artificial intelligence (AI).

Having been written by a neural network called long short-term memory dubbed Benjamin, the very fact that it’s a film penned by an AI makes it compelling to watch.

At the helm of the film is director Oscar Sharp, who collaborated with NYU AI researcher Ross Goodwin.

To develop Benjamin, the team gave the AI sci-fi screenplays available online from the 80s and 90s, where it was dissected and studied closely by the AI who then learned how to essentially stitch the entire screenplay together by stringing letters, words and phrases the typically occur. The resulting script was thus entered in the Sci-Fi London contest where it ranked on the top 10.

You can watch the film here: http://video.arstechnica.com/watch/sunspring-sci-fi-short-film

China’s Planning A Massive Sea Lab 10,000 Feet Underwater

China is planning to build an enormous underwater lab for research purposes; however, the country notes that "it will carry some military functions."
China plans to build a huge sea lab 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface of the South China Sea. This project is part is China’s thirteenth five-year economic plan, and it is ranked two in the country’s top 100 science and technology priorities. The purpose of this project is to help China find minerals in the waters…but it may also have military purposes.

Only a little information is available for the public as of the moment.

The platform will be movable, as noted in the recent presentation by the Ministry of Science and Technology. The deep-sea station is spearheaded by China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation. It will have a dozen crew on board and could stay underwater for about a month.

So. Just how feasible is this? Well, general location faces both geological and technical challenges, such as frequent occurrence of typhoons. The area is estimated to have around 125 billion barrels of oil and around 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. China already spent 1.42 trillion yuan ($216 billion) on research and development in 2015. So they are investing big in the project.

Notably, China previously proved that they can live up to their deepsea ambitions by setting a world record when they sent their submersible Jiaolong to descend 7 kilometers (23,000 feet) into the Indian Ocean.

Interestingly, the “Underwater Great Wall Project,” a network of sensors to help detect US and Russian submarines, has also been proposed.

Scientists Are Closer To The First ‘Universal Cancer Vaccine” With Successful Human Trials

Scientists at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, have successfully conducted three human trials of a "universal cancer vaccine," which they developed as a safety test before going onto larger clinical trials.
FIGHTING CANCER THROUGH THE BODY

Treating cancer is obviously not easy. One of the most well known methods is chemotherapy, and while this has proven to be successful over the years (to a certain degree),it has life-threatening side effects.

But science is developing fast these days, and recent marvels in medicine have given us new ways to fight back—including using one’s own immune system, known as immunotherapy, to combat cancer. With that same principle, researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany have developed what may be the first “universal cancer vaccine,” with preliminary human trials shown to be successful.

It must be noted that a full treatment is still years away. For average treatments, FDA approval can take as long as 8 years, and more clinical trials are needed. However, early work is inspiring.

RECOGNIZING THE PROBLEM

To break down the work, the immune system does not always recognize cancer cells as a threat because they possess similarities with normal cells in the body, which the immune system won’t attack. They key to this vaccine is an antigen, a molecule that serves as an identifier that complicates the way that the immune system recognizes cancer cells and normal cells.

To address this issue, the researchers  basically shot ‘darts’ that contain pieces of RNA from the patient’s cancer cells at their own immune system, causing the body to recognize the threat and deal with it accordingly.

The researchers assert that this method is essentially universal, in the sense that they can simply change the RNA within the darts, and they can use it to treat various cancers.

The team from Germany did their research initially on mice. And according to the study, upon injecting the vaccine, the subject’s immune systems began fighting malignant tumors.

Moreover, the researchers have already done tests of the vaccine on three patients to prove its safety. The patients, diagnosed with melanoma, had only undergone side-effects of flu-like symptoms, and nothing like those in chemotherapy. As reported, in one patient, a suspected tumor on a lymph node got smaller after the vaccine injection.r

Universal Basic Income Hits the U.S—Citizens Will Get Paid Just For Being Born

Universal Basic Income Hits the U.S—Citizens Will Get Paid Just For Being Born


Y Combinator, a seed accelerator and startup incubator, plans to inaugurate a short-term “universal basic income” experiment in Oakland, California; it’s a first step toward a larger, projected five-year study of the guaranteed cost-of-living salary.
THE OAKLAND EXPERIMENT

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “basic income”—the notion of a guaranteed financial disbursement to every human being simply for being alive.

It’s an idea that has garnered a great deal of support in certain circles, for obvious reasons (free money); however, many see it as the natural progression of society…as the only viable way of dealing with issues like increased automation, poverty, etc. Indeed, many see in a universal basic income (UBI) an instrument of liberty, and an effective tool for combating the threats of social unrest, economic dislocation, and various other forms of civil strife that are often the corollaries of unemployment.

There’s even a major national referendum on basic income to be held June 5 in Switzerland. And now the startup accelerator, Y Combinator, whose guiding ethos is seeding and incubating avant-garde businesses and ideas, has stepped into the fray. It plans to launch a short-term pilot program in Oakland, California, a preparatory first step to a longer, five-year experiment.

“Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods—how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc.,” the company explained in a blog post.


THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH

Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, believes that a UBI is a necessary—even an inevitable—evolution in our society, considering the widespread unemployment expected to result from the increased mechanization of jobs.

“In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what,” Altman explains.

“People will be able to volunteer, work, not work, move to another country—anything. We hope basic income promotes freedom, and we want to see how people experience that freedom.”

Of course, not all are onboard. Some in the Swiss government have urged citizens to reject the referendum, explaining that the exorbitant costs would become prohibitive and might bankrupt the country. Which is, of course, is very likely if not managed properly; however, Y Combinator thinks a government model might not be the best choice and that smaller scale operations may prove to be more viable.

There’s no firm date yet for the launch of the Oakland experiment; all we know is that the company is working with city officials and groups to work out the details, and that the program will be headed by Elizabeth Rhodes, a PhD graduate from the University of Michigan.

Without doubt, UBI advocates will be watching the results of the Oakland experiment with great interest.r